According to the Roll Call, the White House will be taking a major role in the merging of the bills from the Senate Finance Committee and from the Senate HELP Committee. And we know who’ll be there at the table from the White House:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Ann DeParle, Obama’s chief health care adviser, are expected to be at the table throughout the talks. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag also is set to play a role, primarily on issues where health care and the federal budget intersect. Staff from the administration, leadership and the committees began joint preparations for the merger of the bills about a week ago.

As Brian Beutler over at TPM has said, Rahm Emanuel has advocated for a trigger on the public option along with Peter Orszag, who also said that co-ops and triggers would work as competitive alternatives to the public option. We now know that the White House is pushing for some "form" of the public option that won’t lose centrist votes. The question becomes–what kind of a public option are they pushing for? At this point, we don’t know if they’re going to push for a national public option that’s run by the government, like the one envisioned by Schumer and by Rockefeller because the White House doesn’t want to lose the votes of Senate moderates:

But Obama and Reid are treading carefully, wary of including a provision that would scare off moderates such as Snowe, Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., who have all indicated they would not support a national public plan.

And another Roll Call story has indicated that the Snowe trigger is still very much alive and on the table:

Because the Finance proposal to create nonprofit health insurance cooperatives has not gained much traction with centrists, leaders have instead focused on finding a way to create a public option that could satisfy both liberals’ and moderates’ concerns, while also bringing more competition to private insurers. Many, including White House officials, see the answer to that problem in Sen. Olympia Snowe’s (R-Maine) proposal to create a "trigger" for a public option in the event other health insurance reforms in the bill do not successfully drive down health insurance costs nor increase coverage. The bonus, they calculate, is that Snowe would sign on to such a bill and help the leaders shore up the votes of wavering centrists.However, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), a leader of the recently formed Moderate Dems Working Group, has proposed allowing states to create public plans or co-ops if they so choose. Last week, senior Democratic aides said the proposal had significant potential as a possible compromise.

From here, we can see that Rahm Emanuel and Peter Orszag will be heavily involved in the merging of the bills from the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committee. The final shape of the public option will be due to their input from President Obama if he weighs in on this matter as the Senators want him to do so. And it’s also up to Senator Harry Reid, who will be hosting these talks with the WH staff, Chairman Baucus, Chairman Harkin, and Dodd on whether to include the public option in the final merged bill.We’re not the only ones just looking to the Senate. The House is looking to final action from the Senate as well because they don’t want to take the political risk of voting for a more liberal bill than the one out of the Senate. I’ve included a link to the full article as well here.

Aides say the House’s deliberations slowed because many Members wanted to see what emerged from the Senate Finance Committee before making commitments. And some complain that the White House has refused to get its hands dirty after President Barack Obama came to Congress to deliver his health care address last month.In the meantime, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been loath to commit publicly to any specifics beyond saying that some form of a public insurance option will be in the House bill, as she faces a fractious Caucus that seemingly spawns a new subgroup every week demanding that something be either included or excluded from the bill.

And they’re also aware about the problems of having regulations, the mandate, and the exchange getting started in 2013, after two election cycles:

Other Democrats are increasingly nervous that the bill must do more to improve the insurance market before 2013, when a national insurance exchange for the uninsured is scheduled to begin.“There is a giant problem with the fact that nothing happens until 2013 and there are two elections in the intervening years,” the aide said. Majority Whip James Clyburn’s (D-S.C.) proposal to include state pilot programs sooner has gained traction, although how that would be accomplished and funded has not been resolved.

The endgame is finally here, and we’ll see where the pieces and the players fall in on the public option in the final conference bill.